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Dominate the Scene
---- Disclaimer: The Social Narrative has roots deep in Humanity's development, social and cultural history. '-> This is satire. <-' (mostly) P;D ---- How to Mutate the Social Narrative and Take Over the World. "It's a recipe for a magical potion. The ingredients are blood, sweat, and tears. Stirring in a little bullshit doesn't hurt, either." -- TheLastWordAlchemist ---- Be Forceful "Pound the table." Be provocative. Use shocking content. Be bombastic. Pick a fight. Turn up the volume. Saturate every channel of media available to you. Actually turn up the decibels in audible media. SHOUT IN ALL-CAPS!!! Use any gimmick at all to garner attention. Constantly repeat the same stock phrases, adjusting only as necessary. Lather, rinse, repeat. Ditto. Reward indoctrination, belief, and proselytization. Get everyone else to do your hard work for you. Offer employment, with a strong emphasis on zealous behavior. Offer grades, degrees, gold stars, fame and fortune. Dole out money in small amounts for each small effort. Punish any attempts to contradict, refute, or examine your arguments. Address contrasting arguments swiftly and directly in public. Behind the scenes, infamy, shame, guilt, and slander all go a long way in punishing a heretic, or in getting others to punish them out of misguided moralism, the need for approval, or to avoid punishment themselves. Pretty much just reverse everything in the previous section. Ridicule, Parody, and Satire -- tools you'll enjoy using! Machiavelli Lite It once was difficult to be both feared and loved simultaneously, but leveraging your current position of controlling the Social Narrative makes it progressively easier. Keep at it, and both approaches will continue to yield dividends. Adopt a simultaneous attitude of superiority, long-suffering patience, humility and vengeance. Use them at your discretion, and always throw in a little randomness to keep everyone else uncertain and confused. Be Eloquent. "Pound the Law." Emphasize and capitalize upon conventional beliefs and values. Always know your audience, and tell them almost exactly what they want to hear. Those who express admiration for your fresh views should be marked for favoritism and promotion; those who see you as making unwelcome changes to their traditions should be marked for exclusion and punishment. Master the vagaries of Logic, Debate, Rhetoric, etc. Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate Wikipedia:List of fallacies The tools of truth, lies, logical fallacies, popular misconceptions, and ignorance can be made truly awe-inspiring in their effectiveness. Know the origins, history, and definitions of the words you use. Have a tremendous vocabulary, and beat others over the head with it, because their vocabulary is smaller and weaker than your own. Create a cult, even a cult of personality. Religions, political parties, philosophies, and ideologies have all depended upon a system of having all the peons keep each other in line, looking for signs of disbelief, transgression, detachment, or even getting ready to cut and run. Setting up such a cult again makes your job that much easier, and ruling over them so much more efficient. Be Articulate. "Pound the facts." Observe carefully, constantly, and minutely. You have the luxury of time; your underlings are doing all the work, so you have the luxury of effort; you can have your lieutenants be responsible for all the daily decisions (so long as you stay on top of them) so you have all of your attention at your disposal. Keep a sharp eye out for tiny details that, when recounted in public, make you seem omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Also humble. Dwell on real and imaginary settings and events. Imagine wild scenarios and variations on the actions of your group, any truly oppositional groups, and all the hoi polloi in between. Surprise people with crap they can't possibly think up themselves, because they're too busy surviving. Describe scenes in excruciatingly vivid detail and dramatically emotional terms. Use any kind of appeal to the senses, prurient interests, and humorous or "scandalized" references to primitive and forbidden behavior or material. Recycle, Inflate, and Reuse Endlessly repeat the same or similar themes. Move from "Drug Abusive" to "Criminal" to "Immoral" to "Irreverent" to "Irreligious" to "Ignorant" to "Superstitious" to "Unscientific" to "Unobjective" to "Argumentative" to "Disrespectful" to "Disobedient" to "Heedless" to "Reckless" to "Sexually Promiscuous" to "Hedonistic" to "Drug Abusive"... this crap is too easy, right? Form or encourage an oppositional foil simply to garner more attention to the subject only as you have framed it. A good example of "foiling" at work. A masterpiece of simplicity and cunning. Elaborate at great length on some miniscule point of a firmly established position. Bury the larger context of those things beyond your reach, the things you cannot control through the Social Narrative alone. (That's all you've got time for, is reaching the top of the damn mountain and stomping on those beneath you, right?) Turn any tiny point of the Social Narrative into an entire empire of its own, and then do the same with something entirely different next week. Mark your calendar and plan ahead -- or have a lackey do it, anyway. Repurpose established positions to prop up new positions and conflicts. Anyone on Earth, and any argument they make, are great subjects for Freudian examination and analysis -- except of course, you, your cult, and your arguments. That's just one example out of the many that are possible. Divide and Conquer In the effort to obscure the real problems of class warfare and wealth distribution, it helps to have the peasants at each others' throats at all times. While there are real issues of race, gender, and (generational) age, the uses they are to be put to are strictly to have all three groups vie against each other for supremacy of place in the public consciousness, and to oppress and stir up the public with constant irritation, demands for compliance, conflict, and hopefully, violence. Not one of these positions is to be allowed to address the real issues of Autonomy, Authority, Wealth Distribution, and Education. Their purpose is to reinforce your version of the Social Narrative, your more "reasonable" positions, and calmer demeanor. This background of Social Entropy then justifies your uses of Authority, Wealth Aggregation (taxes, fees, etc.) and coercive policies. Sharpen the Cleaver "How to do more damage???" Take full advantage of your superior position to invest the time, money and effort others do not have the luxury to spare, and always stay ahead of the little peons. Extra Credit! Synthetic Monoculture: Groupthink on Steroids You can fool all of the policy managers most of the time. Their immune responses to both insoluble problems and novel abuses of the system are identical across the whole of the population. Policy as Treading Water in Rhetorical Posturing Policies are not designed to solve problems, they're designed to win conflicts. The other guy agrees heartily, but only on this one point in contrast to hundreds of others, in which he takes an equally (in-)effective contrary position. Management by (Un-)Reality Crisis A crisis is what happens when the worlds of meaning and consequence intrude upon the ephemeral fiefdoms of rhetoric. If we're not ghosts in the machine, why is it that we find it so easy to ignore reality?? Blame Koestler! P;D Why Does This Matter? Currently, the political polarization of the United States is arguably at an all time high, and the polarization of rich and poor is on the increase as well. While these two problems are mitigated somewhat by the amount of social wealth (low-cost technology, information, etc.), I'd like to make it clear that rhetoric tends to reinforce established interests and the status quo. This sort of rhetoric only makes problems worse, not better. Dialectic allows even the established interests to escape the hole they've dug for themselves. Category:Social Rhetoric Category:Philosophical practice